Loyalty, Faith and Magic
by Ravenwood240
Summary: After the death of Lord Voldemort, one person believes that the past can be changed, that Lord Voldemort must be saved. Bellatrix Black is going to stop Lord Voldemort's death by any means at all.


_A/N: This is the fault of one too many time travel stories and a question about who has gone back in time on the Caer Azkaban site. Who would have the strength to cast a time travel spell, the intelligence to create it and the fanatic loyalty to spend twenty or thirty years doing to return to a time when Voldemort could win? I could only think of one of Voldemort's followers that met all of those qualifications. This is a one shot, period. If someone else wants to pick it up and run with it, go ahead._

_Disclaimer junk: I don't own any of this except the particular arrangement of words that is this story. The concepts, characters and everything you recognize all belongs to some one else, damn it._

_**Loyalty, Faith and Magic.**_

_**Chapter the only.**_

Bellinda Dark sighed as she finished checking her notes for the last time. The Arithmancy calculations were complete. She had finished the equation that would allow her to finally fix everything that was wrong with her world.

She stood up and caught sight of herself in the mirror on the wall. Bellinda was a tall witch with greying hair and the wrinkles of decades of studying by candlelight. Her eyes were dark and held a burning gleam deep in their depths. She stretched and winced as her joints popped and complained. Too many spells cast on her when she was a younger woman. She was only seventy years old, she shouldn't be this sore for another twenty years or so.

She waved her wand at the kettle and started water heating. She thought about the last three decades as she waited for the water to boil.

After the defeat of Lord Voldemort, she had escaped to his last stronghold, the one only the inner circle of Death Eaters knew about. Since all of them except her were very much dead, she had planned on hiding here for a week or so until she could escape Britain entirely.

Almost all the Death Eaters were dead. The Traitor Snape was dead, along with the coward Pettigrew. She was quite likely the last person alive that Lord Voldemort had trusted. The cost had been high for the followers of Harry Bloody Potter. Bellatrix was the last Black. Narcissa, and her weak spawn, dead. Andromeda and all her Mudblood offspring that had polluted the Black lineage, dead at Bella's own hand. Lord Voldemort had fallen to Harry Bloody Potter in the Great Hall at Hogwarts.

The Weasleys had paid a high price as well. Bella had killed the Weasley girl and Molly had gone crazy. She had actually tried to duel Bella. Bellinda smiled at the memory. How Molly had thought to win that fight had gone to the grave with the housewife. Bella had already known that Lord Voldemort had fallen and she had led the fight into the halls of Hogwarts and killed Molly there before using the Honeydukes passage to escape the school. Besides Molly and the girl, Fred, Percy and Arthur Weasley had died in the final fighting.

She had run, seeking only to get away from the despair crushing her.

She winced as she remembered those long ago days of despair. Lord Voldemort had been defeated by Harry Bloody Potter and the Mudblood Granger. Those two had been the ones that sought out and destroyed the Horcruxes that insured Lord Voldemort's immortality. Oh, that Weasley boy had been with them some of the time, but it was obvious that he was nothing more than a follower.

No, Harry Bloody Potter had the will, the desire and the power for them and Mudblood Granger the intelligence in that group. They were the ones to watch out for. She had wept in those days, nearly fallen to despair. She had even once found herself with her wand at her chest. One quick Reducto curse would give her peace.

But surrender was not the Black way. Bellatrix Black would not lay down and die. If she was not able to win, she would make the cost of victory high. Harry Bloody Potter and the Mudblood Granger. Killing those two would make everything worthwhile again. Anyone she got after that would just be icing on the cake.

Bellatrix began looking through the books that Lord Voldemort had collected, looking for spells and curses to help her murder more people. Bellatrix had never been the most stable person and years of torture and imprisonment had not helped her. Now, this final blow and the loss of Lord Voldemort had pushed her over the edge, spiralling down into true insanity. She would have likely been just a footnote in history had she gone with that plan, but she'd found something in Lord Voldemort's notes that had stopped her in her tracks.

Lord Voldemort was far more intelligent than she was and she'd known that he often read and researched things in the late hours of the night. This book, this thin notebook was full of speculations and research into time travel.

Not the short term dangers of a Time Turner, but actual time travel, spanning decades, possibly centuries. Bellatrix had found the beginnings of an Arithmancy equation that would allow a person to move in time. She carefully read the entire notebook, an idea stirring in the back of her head. It would take decades of research to acquire the skills and create the complete equation but it wasn't like she had anything better to do right now, was it?

Seven days later, the newly created Bellinda Dark left Britain for the first time, looking for a teacher that could teach her Arithmancy. Over the next ten years, Bellinda Dark earned a Mastery in Arithmancy. After she had learned as much as other people could teach her, she settled in Hogsmeade, living in a small house on the edge of town. She had a goal, a mission and she had no one to turn to for help. She was not stupid, but neither was she a genius. Had it not been for that small beginning that Lord Voldemort had left behind, she would have been lost.

Even with it, it had taken her twenty years of study and research to create the final equation that would send her back to a chosen point in time.

Bella made a cup of tea and looked around her house while she sipped it. It was a five room house with a small cellar and she'd spend two decades living here. It was as familiar to her as any other place in the world and it was hers in a way no other place was. It had been her study room, her refuge from the changing world and her sanctuary. She sighed. It would be a pity to lose this place, but she couldn't take it back in time with her. You could only take back as much as you could carry under your own muscle power. The equations had made that clear.

Bella went to bed, knowing that tomorrow she would have to be at her best or the last thirty years would all be for nothing. She continued to think about the last thirty years until she faded into sleep.

While she worked on the spell equations, she watched as the Mudblood Granger and Harry Bloody Potter changed the world. Their liberal ideas and soft-hearted ways accelerated the moral decay that had been winding its way into all levels of society.

Why, people no longer observed even basic courtesy. It was considered acceptable for a younger man to address an older man by his first name without being invited to. And Bellatrix refused to even think about the costumes the younger people wore these days. Harlots of a proper time wouldn't wear those things.

She watched it all though, marking things that would have to be changed or fixed once she went back and showed her Lord all the things that were going to happen. She often dreamed of the punishments that Lord Voldemort would hand out to those people that had failed him or betrayed him.

Ironically, it was the Mudblood Granger that gave her the best intelligence as to what had gone wrong with Lord Voldemort's attempt to fix the declining Wizard world. Eight years after the end of the war, she had published a book. "An Inside Look at the Voldemort War" had told Bellatrix things that she had never known were going on around her. Snape had betrayed them, Draco was too weak to properly serve Lord Voldemort and the rest had been mostly incompetent.

Bella had studied the history of the war, marking those points that had been significant and calculating what actions would have been the best for Lord Voldemort. She had planned on simply going back to 1991 and insuring that Harry Potter didn't prevent Lord Voldemort from acquiring the Sorcerer's Stone, but after her studies, she'd decided that it would be better to go back further.

Bellatrix woke the next morning and dressed, packing a small bag with the things she would be taking back with her. Four books and the small notebook she'd found so long ago, now nearly destroyed by constant use. The remains of the Black gold that she had been able to get. Harry Bloody Potter had most of it now, but there had been a small vault set aside for her long ago and she had drained it.

She sighed as she looked at the bookshelves of volumes that she couldn't take. She ran her hands lightly over the spines of her constant companions, already regretting their loss. They had been faithful, never blaming her for things she couldn't control or forcing her to do things she didn't want to do. She turned from them and made a simple, filling meal, leaving the dishes on the table.

If this spell worked right, she'd never be back to have to do them. Of course, if it didn't work, she'd never know it. The amount of energy she was trying to harness with this spell would destroy all of Hogsmeade if something went wrong.

Bellatrix took one last look around, making sure she had everything she needed and went into the cellar. The builder of this house would not have recognized the cellar. It had been a rough walled room with a dirt floor, just a place to store things that weren't being used often.

Now, it was a perfectly square cube exactly three meters on a side. Except for the hole where the doorway was, it was green marble, polished smooth and as flat as practise and magic could make it. The walls were covered with runes and equations, all painstakingly carved out of the marble and filled with silver. There were five lines of arcane symbols rounding around the room and it was clear that they were all unfinished.

Bella transformed the door into more marble and smoothed it out, leaving only a small gap at the top for air. She started with the line of equations in the centre of the door, copying them from her notes and filling them in with silver as she finished each one.

She smiled as the last rune was filled in. She felt the magic begin to build. This line would power the spell, building and accumulating the power needed until it reached the critical point. If she had finished the rest of the lines, it would cast her spell. If she hadn't, it would do something else. Since that something else would involve the release of a huge amount of energy here, Bella hadn't bothered trying to find out what it would do. She'd be dead and all her plans with her.

She started the second line, the one that would protect her from the ravages of time during the trip. It was a simple line and she was soon finished.

The third line would vault her through space, making sure she landed in a very particular spot. She absolutely had to appear there, as there was no other way she knew of to find that house. This was also a simple line, being a variation of the standards Apparation equations.

The fourth line was the critical one. This was the line that would open time to her manipulations and send her to the very day she wanted. She carefully checked and rechecked this line four times before filling it in with silver.

She checked the power line. It was building exactly as she had expected and she smiled. She would have plenty of time to do the last line. She closed the gap she had left in the doorway and smoothed the marble, beginning the final line, the one that would tie all the others together and make sure that the power was distributed properly.

She wasn't worried about the air any more. She'd be done and gone or dead before the air ran out.

She kept an eye on the building power as she worked. It was going to be a bit closer than she liked, but there was no way to stop it now.

She finished her equation and stepped into the place marked for her feet in the middle of the room. The spell would activate any minute now and she stared proudly at her work. Thirty years of sweat and toil, painstaking research and development, all of it had led to this mome...

Bellatrix Black disappeared in a flash of light.

_A/N: The end._

_I started writing this about four hours ago and at that time, this was it, the end and everything that was going to happen after this was going to be left to your imagination._

_Those of you that have been reading my works for awhile might recognize those words. BoB started that way, SoM started that way... you get the idea. Now, I have two separate bunnies chewing on my ankles as I finish this. One in which Bella succeeds in going back to her destination, one in which she gets a bigger surprise than anything she could have imagined._

_Meh... I am going to resist writing them though._

_Raven_


End file.
